Monday, July 27, 2015

Gordon Lightfoot has had a long and successful career as a singer-songwriter. An early contributor to the folk music scene in the 1960s, his hits included "Early Morning Rain,"For Loving Me," and Canadian Railroad Trilogy." In the 1970s he had hits on the Billboard Pop charts with "If You Could Read My Mind," "Sundown," and "Carefree Highway," among others. He continued to record and perform through the 1980s and 1990s, recording this Dylan song in 1998.

"Ring Them Bells" was first recorded by Bob Dylan on the album, "Oh Mercy" in 1989. It has been feature on this blog twice before with Ron Sexsmith, Sheryl Crow, and Elvis Costello in a post titled, T.S. Elliot and Bob Dylan Ring the Bells; and later with a young artist named Hope Waits.

Lightfoot
had a life threatening aortic aneurism in 2002 and a light stroke in
2006, but has continued to perform. His most recent recording was "All
Live" in 2012.

Friday, July 24, 2015

I
remember my first awakening to what the Confederate battle flag meant to
African Americans. It came remarkably late, but illustrates the endemic
Southern culture and how we white folks can be so blind to "other people's
histories," as the late Rev. Clementa Pinkney put it. I was a seminary
student at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in Mill Valley, California. The year
would have been 1978, and I would have been 23 years old. My roommate in the
men's dorm was from east Tennessee and I was from central Alabama. One day we
were out somewhere in San Francisco and happened to see some small Confederate
flags in a shop. We thought it would be a real hoot to show our Southern
heritageback on campus at our
dormitory, so we each bought one of the flags. They were small, only about 3 or 4 inches, attached
to a stick that was 8 to 10 inches in length.

We
mounted them on the door of our dorm room for all to see, crossing one over the
other to make an "X" with the flags draping down. To us, we were
affirming our regional heritage in a place that had students mostly from the
western states, but there were some from all over the country and even other
parts of the world. We were outsiders on the California West Coast, in a part
of the country that was far from Southern in culture, and we were affirming our
heritage.

A
Quick History Lesson

Just
down the hall from us was a fellow student a little older that we were (he was
29 or 30). Willie was from Mississippi and was African American. One afternoon
when I came in from class, Willie called me aside and asked me to come to his
room. He wanted to know why we had those flags on our door. I told him why, in
similar terms as I have just related. He then told me about how the Confederate
flag was viewed by the black community and what it elicited for him. I heard
from him of the pain of racism and the fears of violence from white
supremacists that he had grown up with.

His
concern was that he wondered if people who waved the Confederate flag were in
support of the white supremacists' legacy of subjugation of blacks. I told him
that was not at all what we were thinking. I'm not sure he believed me at that
moment, but I went immediately to my dorm room and removed the flags. When my
roommate came in, I explained to him that we could not have those flags on the
door. He was a little put out, but I told him about the conversation I had with
Willie. My roommate was not immediately convinced. After all, the country had
enacted civil rights, voting rights, and equal opportunity – we were not wanting
to go back to the 19th century. We were just celebrating the place of our
birth. Nevertheless, I told him, we cannot have these flags on our door. My own
understanding at that point was only about 30 minutes ahead of my roommate's.

Seeking
Equity

My
roommate and I had lived our entire life in the South with very little
knowledge of the different world that our African American neighbors lived in.
It would be many years later before I would even begin to comprehend that while
my childhood in the rural South was quite idyllic, my black neighbors just a
few miles away lived in what would have to be termed a dystopian terrorist
state – because of the Jim Crow laws that were in effect. We were all citizens
of the same country, but our experiences were so very different.

In
that moment back in 1978, it was more important for me to hear someone else’s
story than to proudly proclaim my own story. Hearing about another person’s
history began to open my eyes to my own actions. It was far more important for
me to inflict no further harm and to eliminate any cause for ill will than it
was to celebrate some half-remembered heritage. I remain a citizen of the South
to this day, but my hope is for a South that can celebrate its present and
future possibilities more than some idealized remembrance of the past.

*Blank verse: "Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse. This 10-syllable line is the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered the closest to English speech patterns. Poems such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” are written predominantly in blank verse." (Definition from The Poetry Foundation)

Monday, July 20, 2015

Here is classic Southern Gospel from a recording session for Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol II (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band). Johnny Cash and the Carter Family, along with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (and Earl Scruggs), give us a rendition that is top of the line.

Friday, July 17, 2015

[Note: The following essay is not a review of Go Set a Watchmen but rather it is my take on how Harper Lee's own journey was similar to what Joseph Campbell described as the archetypal hero's journey. My essay also appeared at AMERICAblog]

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the screen version of TKAM

There has been an abundance of talk this week about Atticus Finch, the fictional character in To Kill a Mockingbird. The release of Harper Lee’s earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman has created quite a buzz. Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s first submission which the publisher’s rejected and encouraged her to go back and rewrite, focusing on young Scout’s point of view. The publishing of that first draft has not been without controversy. The buzz now that it has been released is all about the portrayal of Atticus Finch as a racist. He looked upon blacks as though they were children, not yet ready for the full equality of citizenship. He was even a member of the White Citizen’s Council and didn’t like the idea of the Supreme Court meddling in the affairs of his Southern town.

Many seem to be feeling dazed over the fact that Atticus Finch, or probably more accurately, Gregory Peck’s cinematic version of Atticus Finch, could be so much a part of the Southern racist mindset. Much will be said about the literary value of Go Set a Watchman, and much analysis will be given regarding the protagonist of both of Harper Lee’s novels in light of the new information that has now been made public. Instead of literary criticism, I would like to take a look at the literary dilemma of Watchman in light of Harper Lee’s own journey. I see it as what Joseph Campbell has called, “the hero’s journey.”

The Traveler Comes Home

In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise (whom we knew previously as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird) is a young adult woman who has been living in New York City, and returns to her Southern hometown to be dismayed by the racism she sees in her beloved father. It has long been noted that the gentlemanly Southern lawyer, Atticus Finch, is based upon Harper Lee’s own father who was an influential lawyer in the small southern town of Monroeville, Alabama. In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise’s experience is too similar to the author’s own life not to wonder about the autobiographical nature of the writing. After all, Harper Lee had left Monroeville, Alabama to live and work in New York City.

Remember that this was the 1950s, when the South was still under Jim Crow laws, fully segregated, and resisting implementation of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The paternalistic view seen in the Atticus Finch of Go Tell a Watchman is characteristic of many educated whites of the time, and a view that might have been considered “forward thinking” by fellow Southerners. The problem is that Jean Louise has seen the world and now sees her own town and townsfolk in a different light.

I am a Southerner, born and raised in a small town in Alabama, and I can speak to the effects that travel can have upon one’s perception of things back home. I first went to the big city to go to college, and then I went, not to New York, but to the San Francisco Bay Area for three and a half years. My trek was in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and I can attest to the feelings of shock and dismay when revisiting one’s hometown with a renewed vision and seeing the racist attitudes on display. Those attitudes had always been there, they were part and parcel of my own upbringing, but I could not see them clearly until having spent some significant time out of the South.

A Hero’s Vision

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, talked about a common archetype in mythology in which the hero makes a long journey to a distant land. He is changed in the process of that journey by the things he encounters (in mythology, it is often a magical realm of unsuspected challenge and/or danger). Eventually the hero returns home with a new vision and gives hope and courage to his people based upon the transformation that his journey has wrought within him. Psychologists tell us that these mythological archetypes are present in all of us, and that we each live out these various archetypes to some extent. I would submit that Harper Lee made that hero’s journey and while her initial return home is reflected in Go Set a Watchman, her transformative work is seen in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Having made my own journey out and back home again, I can attest to the dismay in realizing that the people I revered and who nurtured and taught me so much, could also exhibit racist tendencies. I cannot claim to be on a hero’s journey, but I think I understand some of the things at work in that archetypal expression. I can see how Harper Lee would have been frustrated by the mindset of her friends back home, but since these are her loved ones, there is more than frustration. When our travels break us free from those regional bonds and drop the scales from our eyes, so to speak, our first impulse is to demand that that everyone else “see the light” just as we have. The problem is that they have not left home; they have not been on that long transformative journey. The returning hero, as mythology points out, must then find some way to open the eyes of his people.

The Transformative Power of Story

Harper Lee found a way to open the eyes of her people and was able to craft the transformative work that would enable all of us to see ourselves in a new light. In other words, she completed the hero’s journey when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. She found something redemptive in that racist Southern culture that would give us all hope that things can be better than they are now. When To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, most Southern whites were denying that there was a problem. Resistance against civil rights was widespread throughout the South. Harper Lee, however, not only gave hope to the movement for racial equality, she also showed the white people in power that there was some decency within them which meant that they did not have to be trapped in an evil racist system. Not only was there hope for blacks to throw off the shackles of oppression, there was hope for whites to throw off their own shackles of bitter racism.

We were not there in 1960. Though we have made some progress, we are still not there in 2015. Thanks to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which we now see came about by way of wrestling with the harsh realities of a racist culture in Go Set a Watchman)we have a transformative gift given to us by that hero with a thousand faces. Harper Lee took a hard painful look at the racist South and she found that element within our own culture that could save us from ourselves. That gift, it turns out is universal – it is not just for the South. That saving grace in the midst of injustice and oppression that we see in To Kill a Mockingbird has resonated through the years all over the world.

Many have left the South and have been changed by the experience of living somewhere else – tracing the hero’s journey. Many left and never come back and some returned. While others have come back home and tried to make a difference, only Harper Lee has returned to the South and given us something so astounding as To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather than mourn over the clay feet of a fictional character, or fret over the awkwardness of literary first drafts, I choose to be grateful for Harper Lee and the hero’s journey that she has demonstrated to world.